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How many times in the past few years have you heard, “This is not just an improvement program. It’s a revolution in management thinking”? Then, after thinking about this specific revolution, you find that, in many ways, it is similar to other revolutions you’ve recently heard about, such as reengineering, total quality management, activity-based costing or management, just-in-time management, time compression management, employee empowerment, benchmarking, lean manufacturing, economic value analysis, or broadbanding.1

How can so many revolutions — similar in many ways — be concurrent? First, some revolutionary improvement techniques are identified with problems that are limited to specific parts of the organization. Second, only a small subset of an organization’s members may understand the jargon of each method. Third, different strategies often require emphasis on different aspects of performance to which the specific improvement methods are directed. Organizations face the challenge of choosing from a plethora of methods that claim to effectively and efficiently reduce costs and improve service and value to customers. One way for the whole organization to improve is to merge methods, because each revolutionary method, by itself, may be ineffective or inefficient in parts of the organization. We present a framework that helps managers understand why this failure occurs. The framework also helps managers merge improvement methods. This leveraging of methods makes it possible to produce more significant results in less time than the application of any single approach. Managers can use the framework to create their own management revolution.

Understanding Improvement Methods

Any improvement method has four major components:

A particular perspective that defines its approach and objective.

A special language or jargon.

Analytical tools and techniques.

Change tools and techniques.

Understanding the four components of a specific method has several benefits. It provides a basis for assessing the applicability (and likelihood of success) of a method in specific situations. As we will demonstrate, the method’s perspective, language, and tools help to identify and define the problem, how to address it, and who should address it. It helps a manager identify and address the potential weaknesses of a specific improvement technique. And it gives a relatively simple, powerful way for finding opportunities to link various methods.

· Perspective or Frame of Reference.

The perspective of an improvement method can be thought of as an observation platform that allows a manager to focus on the objective and see the route for getting there.

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1. Our intention is not to belittle or denigrate attempts to improve management practice and organizational productivity. We are aware of both private- and public-sector organizations in which the improvement methods referred to here have helped to increase productivity dramatically.

4. We based our discussion about the users of these methods on our experience and the comments of the managers, consultants, and academics who have either discussed this issue with us or reviewed this manuscript. For a similar identification of improvement methods with functional groups, see also: